LA CIENEGA AREA

Over the years, Gary Lloyd has worked in video, performance, environmental art, sculpture and painting. Although this might suggest a lack of focus, his work is tightly bound together by a common theme: the precariousness of man’s survival in the face of his misuse of natural and technological resources.

Lloyd’s latest paintings continue this stance through a series of superimposed signs that resemble multiple silkscreens. His symbolism ranges from images of prehistory to forebodings of potential destruction. Thus, an automobile tire and a gnarled tree trunk floating over the moon’s surface suggest the interdependence of macro- and micro-universes, of natural and man-made phenomena. In contrast, the vision of a mushroom cloud juxtaposed with a supermarket price code and color key suggests more elusive connections between conspicuous consumption, high tech and the psychological marketability of the nuclear holocaust.

The possibility of such interpretation is both the strength and weakness of Lloyd’s work. While the appearance of an open text seems to encourage viewer participation, creating an interplay between the codes of visual and conceptual language, his straightforward juxtapositions and ironic symbolism can also come across as facile and overly idealistic. More seriously, Lloyd’s return to painting after his more populist forays into performance smacks of empty gesture and of preaching to the converted rather than a commitment to real political action. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to July 2.)